Osama bin Laden’s assassination should provide us with a good
deal to think about

B

Y
NOAM CHOMSKY

It is increasingly clear that the operation was a
planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of
international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend
the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos
facing virtually no opposition – except, they claim, from his wife,
who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for
law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress
“suspects”. In April 2002 the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller,
informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in
history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the
plot was hatched in Afghanistan though implemented in the UAE and
Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t
know eight months earlier when Washington dismissed tentative offers
by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were
instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented
with evidence – which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have.
Thus Obama was simply lying when he said in his White House statement
that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda”.

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much
talk of bin Laden’s “confession” but that is rather like my confession
that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a
great achievement.

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s
anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden though surely elements
of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in
Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the US invaded
their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American
fervour is already very high in Pakistan and these events are likely
to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already,
predictably, provoking both anger and scepticism in much of the Muslim
world.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if
Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him
and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes
vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but
uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the
“supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in
that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”
(quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged:
the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction
of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now
spread to the rest of the region.

There is more to say about (Cuban airline bomber
Orlando) Bosch who just died peacefully in Florida, including
reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbour
terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be
treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for
invasion and destruction of the US and murder of its criminal
president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial
mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can
perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with
courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It is like naming
our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It
is as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and
“Gypsy”.

There is much more to say but even the most obvious
and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think
about.

n

(Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s department of linguistics and
philosophy and the author of numerous best-selling political works.
This article was posted on the blog of the online magazine
Guernica on May 6, 2011.)